According to analysis by Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre, Thursday tends to be the highest returning day of the week for the S&P 500 (^GSPC) and stock markets in general. He also examines market performance trends for different periods of the day.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
- Stocks that is little change. But it turns out Thursday is the best day for stocks. Jared Blikre, I didn't know that is here with the details.
JARED BLIKRE: That's right. Guess what? It's Thursday. Guess what happened last Thursday? That was the day after NVIDIA announcements when they tacked on, I don't remember how many trillions to their market cap. It was about 277 billion if my memory serves me. But overall, I'm tracking the days in the market, Monday through Friday. And since those October lows, that pink line up top, this is Thursday.
And right around there, you're going to see a purple line. That is the S&P 500. That's scaled on the left. But the next best day is Friday. And that's green. That's a little farther down and you can see that's really flatlined during the month of February. And then also, I would add that Monday, actually Monday is still positive here. But Tuesday and Wednesday are negative since the beginning of the year.
So there have definitely been some better days to be in the market than not. I've also been parsing the market by time of day. And as it turns out, the gap-- the overnight gap, if you were to buy on the close and then close on the open. In other words, you were long the stock overnight, long the index overnight. That's actually the best place to be and it's not surprising. Because the market is actually closed 17 and 1/2 hours per day. It's only open 6 and 1/2 hours per day.
So one of the characteristics of a bull market is you want to have the gap leading. And that's been the case since those October lows. Wasn't necessarily the case going back before those October lows last year, so just improving characteristics of the bull market. Now since we got just a little bit of time left, I wanted to show you what's been happening this month in terms of sector action.
I'm going to do a deeper dive right after the close. But here's the large caps sectors for the month of February, consumer discretionary that is by far and away the best performing sector. But then industrials and materials been talking about the broadening rally tech. Tech is number 4.
